Last Monday, I started writing about the Yale Open Curriculum course, Introduction to Theory of Literature. This week when I've found free moments, I've been trying to do some of the readings for the class.

The first reading assigned was "What is an Author?" by Michel Foucault. It has many stimulating thoughts, and seems to build on Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author", which is the other assigned reading.

Foucault starts off talking about Beckett, and perhaps hinting at Barthes, by echoing the question, "What does it matter who is speaking?" How much does it matter who the author really is? To bring it to this blog, does it matter if, I, Aldon Hynes, am writing the blog post, or if there is a guest poster, or perhaps a ghost writer?

Does it matter whether or not the play Romeo and Juliet was really written by a person named "William Shakespeare", or by someone else? Does it matter that Kierkegaard used many different pen names, or that many early texts may have been written by different people and attributed to the same 'author'?

Related to this, we get into a concern about the large opus of works. How does our understanding of "William Shakespeare" change if a newly discovered play is attributed to him, or some play that had been attributed to him turns out not to really be by him?

One reason why the idea of 'author' may matter these days is in terms of intellectual property, copyright, and who gets paid for what. Yet does that apply to blogs? To Tweets? To Facebook posts? How about to material placed in the public domain or protected by a creative commons license?

As I read all of this, my mind wandered to a topic more common among my marketing oriented online friends, that of personal branding. As I work on establishing my personal brand, as it relates to my reputation, and to the collection of material I am producing online, how does this relate to the idea of an 'author'?

Beyond this, in this age of reality television and the cult of personality, how do we understand the individual, the author, or the brand of major online personalities? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the current cult of personality, and how does it relate to the history of the idea of heroes, authors, and others?

How does it relate to what each one of us is doing each day as we decide what to write, tweet, or retweet?

I'll read more Foucault, some Barthes, watch the next video in the Yale class, and share more thoughts about this. But first, I'll spend a little more time developing my own brand, authorship, or whatever, as I connect with people on Empire Avenue, Triberr, and use Nimble to try and keep some of it all straight.